The key challenge in making distributional comparisons with ordinal data is the lack of commensurability of the distances between the ordered categories. This chapter provides a critical review of the most recent theoretical developments addressing this challenge and providing methods for...

This chapter comprises three main parts. The first part is about data sources, the definitions of income, and the methodologies used to estimate top income shares. Both the standard sources and methods used by the traditional top income studies are described. Further, new developments that...